It’s a Mini Adventure
In my last post on my search for a replacement for the TViX, I summarised my requirements thus:
a small form factor device with plenty of storage, capable of playing a variety of audio and video formats, a user-friendly interface and remote, a (preferably dual) TV Tuner with PVR capabilities, a DVD player and access to online content. It should also be able to handle HD when I finally get a big telly
If I’m honest, that was a bit disingenuous, because I’d pretty much already decided what I was going to be using as a replacement; I just thought breaking it up into separate blog posts read better.
Obviously, there’s no off-the-shelf set-top box which can do everything I’m after, and as far as I’m aware there’s not even one which can be easily hacked into doing it. It became clear pretty quickly that I wasn’t talking about getting a media player so much as I was talking about getting a small computer dedicated to performing media player functions. Apple aficionado that I am, it was always going to be a Mac Mini.
A brand new 2.0 GHz Mac Mini from the Apple Store was going to push this project way out of my budget, but after some investigation I concluded that I probably didn’t need that much power for my purposes anyway. I found a really helpful bloke on eBay selling upgraded (maxed-out RAM, 320GB HDD) 1.83GHz Mac Minis and I was in business.
The next purchase was an Elgato Eye TV Diversity USB TV Tuner (the only dual tuner option Elgato do). It’s a chunky USB stick with two aerial inputs that comes with two little desktop aerials and an aeriel splitter so you can either use it ‘on-the-go’ or plug it into a rooftop aerial. It can be used in ‘Diversity’ mode, which uses both tuners together to get a better signal in weaker areas, or in Dual Tuner mode. I get decent Freeview reception, so I opted for the latter. On a side note, the EyeTV is the first bit of kit I’ve bought ages that comes with everything you might need to use it – there are no hidden extras you’ll need to purchase to use it in any of its modes.
The only missing piece of the puzzle was the cable needed to hook up my ancient TV. The Mac Mini has a DVI out and comes with a DVI-VGA adaptor. As and when I upgrade my telly, I can either get one that accepts VGA in, or DVI-HDMI connectors are reasonably inexpensive. Until then, however, Apple sell a DVI-Video adaptor for £15 which outputs to either composite or S-Video. This runs into the TV via the SCART adaptor that I’ve been using with the TViX. So the hardware looks like this:
UPDATE: After a recent conversation with Dave at This Much I Know, it turns out that the new (post March 2009) Minis have mini-DVI and DisplayPort instead of a standard DVI port, and the Apple-branded Mini-DVD -> Video adaptors do not work with this machine. Consequently, there doesn’t appear to be a simple way to hook these machines up to a Standard Definiton TV via Scart or Composite video in.
Next I’ll look at the initial setup
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